


With Eyes to See

by Tseecka



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tseecka/pseuds/Tseecka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And then there’s Vaan, 17 year old Vaan with the most expressive face Balthier’s ever seen, and the first time he sees it he scoffs inside at how easy the boy is to read, his big blue eyes limpid and shining with emotions he doesn’t even try to hide."</p><p>Balthier sees everything, but Vaan doesn't even try to hide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Eyes to See

He’s always had an exceptionally good eye, and it’s served him well over the years. He can spot the single flaw in the hull sheeting on the side of a ship, can spot out the one rivet that doesn’t lie exactly flush. He can catch a hold of a soft silken thread, the colour of cream, and undo a run or a pull, re-weaving the fabric until it’s seamless and flawless again. He can sight down the barrel of his father’s old Altair almost effortlessly, tracking the movement of a sand-coloured shadow through the haze of the heat rising off the desert, ignore the shifting, shimmering mirage to make a perfect shot. He can estimate to a bare inch the distance between a pair of closing bay doors and know how fast to throttle the Stahl so that she squeaks through them with just enough space to keep from scratching the finish and not enough space for pursuit to follow him through. He can toss a dart with ridiculous ease, letting fly with an almost lazy flourish and not even needing to track it’s path to know it’s landed exactly where he means it to—not in the bullseye, always, sometimes just in the inner circle, close enough to the multipliers that he can feign charmingly delighted surprise at his excellent luck.

 

His eye serves him well with people, too; he can spot the nervous tic that belies a falsehood, and the other one that means there’s something a person’s not telling him. He can see the miniscule twitch, the change in the shape of an eye that means Fran’s barely managing to keep back a smile, and he always knows when Clio’s upset with him because she holds herself just slightly different, her weight canted a little more to the right and a ridge of fur on the top of her head standing a little stiffer than usual. He’s good at reading people, at understanding what they need or want from him or others, and while sometimes they can work at throwing him off—Basch does, he knows it, the man’s taken great pains to batter at his own emotional façade until the only thing Balthier can ever read from him is like the face of an ancient weathered stone that may have once borne markings, and now only reveals faint shadows of depressions where the tells used to be—there aren’t many who can throw him off completely. 

 

And then there’s Vaan, 17 year old Vaan with the most expressive face Balthier’s ever seen, and the first time he sees it he scoffs inside at how easy the boy is to read, his big blue eyes limpid and shining with emotions he doesn’t even try to hide. His face is an open book, his thoughts and feelings written clear across his features in fluorescent ink, shifting and mercurial from moment to moment as every tiny change in his demeanour rearranges his entire body, the way he holds himself, his facial expression, the petulant tone of his voice. 

 

He thinks he should feel disgust at the crudeness of it all, the lack of finesse, the obvious need for schooling in how not to let potential enemies know exactly how you feel about this, that, and the other thing; yet somehow, the boy’s openness is surprisingly endearing, in the same way the naivete of a two month kitten is endearing. It’s as though he’s so little, so cute, so utterly bereft of any real understanding of how the world works that his struggles to make it through are adorable rather than atrocious. It shouldn’t be that way, Balthier thinks as he sits in the cockpit of the Stahl with his hands on the yoke, guiding the ship as natural as breathing. Vaan’s seen too much hurt and pain in his short life to be that dreadfully innocent of the cruelties of the world around him. He has to know that if you show someone what you care about, you give them the power to take it away; yet Vaan makes no secret of what his weaknesses are. He’s stronger than he should be for a boy who holds out his dearest treasures on a platter for a cruel man’s taking, and he’s just lucky Balthier’s not a cruel man. ‘If you wear your heart on your sleeve, you are only offering a target for an enemy’s arrow,’ Fran was fond of saying. It was a true sentiment, and common sense throughout most of Ivalice, yet Vaan seemed to have never heard it before. 

 

He can still remember the expression on Vaan’s face in the Sandsea, when he heard that Penelo had been taken. Not a care for who saw or heard, he’d made no effort to hide how much the girl meant to him, and in that moment, Balthier had been able to read, written clear across his face as though etched by the boy’s freckles themselves, the fact that Vaan would go to the ends of the earth to save the girl. If he’d been a cruel man…

 

Yet somehow the open orphan boy with the angry voice and sad, sad eyes had wormed his way into Balthier’s heart and, more impressively, onto his ship, and the thought of betraying that trust was now as unthinkable as it would be to betray Fran’s. He’d even gone so far as to try and teach Vaan how to hide his emotions, how to construct a perfect impassive mask that only his closest friends would be able to read—and when had he begun to count Vaan among his own closest friends, he wondered with a shake of his head. He tips the yoke to one side, sending the Stahl into a wide curve out and over the sea as he thinks. The airship comes around, perpendicular to the landmass and the open landing field, and Balthier prepares for landing, mind only half on the task at hand. 

 

Vaan had refused to learn, looking at Balthier with an expression that clearly asked why he should ever want to hide his feelings, and Balthier supposes he can understand. There are certain walks of life where you can’t trust anyone; his own is one, where you never know if a petitioner really wants a Rogue Tomato killed or if they’re laying out a trap of their own for an infamous sky pirate with a sizable bounty on his head if you know the right people. But growing up without a family…he guesses that maybe there are some times when you need to be able to trust at least one other person, and no one will trust a man with a guarded face. Vaan, he muses, is probably Penelo’s trusted one, and when he thinks of Vaan’s face , he knows he’s probably right. 

 

And really, Balthier thinks as he glances through the front window and down at the ground speeding up towards them, tilting the yoke back ever so slightly to begin to level them off, expertly gauging the distance at which the repulsors will kick in just above the ground, he can’t complain too much. Beyond being able to trust the boy implicitly, beyond knowing that he is in fact good and kind and trustworthy and the kind of person Balthier is frankly refreshed to have aboard his ship, he has reason to be glad that he can read Vaan like an open book. 

 

Even when hazing over from pain and the rush of blood through his skull and body and down out the gaping hole the nekhbet had carved into his chest, Balthier still had a good eye, for counting grains of sand, for gauging how far he had stumbled since he’d begun bleeding out like a sacrificial lamb, and for seeing the expression written all over Vaan’s face as the boy had thrown his own defense to the wind and flung the tuft of softly flaming down into the air. The nekhbet had collided with him, legs raking at the air and at Vaan’s face, and it was only Fran’s quick Protect that had kept him from succumbing the same as Balthier had.

 

The same as he almost had, before Vaan had brought him back from the brink of death with a wordless cry that was echoed in the eyes that clearly told the pirate just how much it would hurt Vaan for him to die right then. 

 

Balthier hears the soft scuff of leather shoes, the sound of a lanky boy getting used to walking on soles when he’s never worn anything but his bare feet before. He smiles, just a small one, not enough for anyone to tell if he’s smiling because of the youth standing behind the pilot’s seat with hands on his shoulders or because he just managed a perfect landing, barely a bump as the Stahl glides in to rest on the grass and he powers down the engines. Balthier’s got a good eye, but he’s even better at avoiding the eyes of others; except, maybe, for Vaan. 

 

Because despite his own revealing face, Vaan’s proved rather good at deciphering what’s going on in Balthier’s mind as easily as Balthier can discern the thoughts in his, and the pirate thinks that maybe it’s because he lets his guard down around Vaan now, more than he has with anyone before. He could work at it, could shore up the barriers and reinforce the walls to keep him out, but he quite likes having this easy trust with at least one other person in the entire world, and really, it’s the least he can do.


End file.
